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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

A person wrote articles that another person felt were defamatory, second person sued Google for indexing them.

yep, while I agree defamation is bad, I find the whole "publisher" argument somewhat obsolete. If everyone can be a publisher, then no one is.

The first party is not even the first party, since this "Ripoff Report" site is user-contributed content. It looks like this plaintiff and some American woman were shitposting on that site, and Google indexed it, and the Australian woman sued Google.

Full Streisand. https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/janice-duffy-psychic-st...

Why would you publish a link to the defamatory content? I know what the Streisand effect is and I can tell you that because of it I have been subjected to horrible abuse over the past few year, even threats put in my letter box.

And it's only defamation if it's false, which I'm not sure was investigated.

1) IANAL, but there are circumstances and legal jurisdictions where truth is not necessarily an ironclad defense against defamation claims.

2) Ironically, I think the stronger the defamation laws, the worse the problem of defamation becomes because more people become likely to believe dumb random claims they hear are true or otherwise nobody would risk saying it. I believe that a hypothetical society with no defamation laws would be the safest from people believing false random claims.

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